Michael Walsh wrote a column in The New York Postlast week. It’s a good one. A couple excerpts.

And yet, the economy is humming, hosts of regulations have been rolled back, the unemployment rate is down, job openings are soaring, taxes have been cut and black joblessness is at an all-time low. Prototypes for the wall along the Mexican border are being tested, raids by ICE are rounding up dangerous illegal aliens and the “travel ban” against several Muslim nations was argued last month before the Supreme Court, where the president’s authority over immigration will be upheld.

In foreign affairs, the two Koreas are talking to each other, with a summit between Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un slated for June in Singapore, the ISIS “caliphate” has been effectively destroyed and just last week Trump yanked the carpets out from under the Iranian mullahs and canceled the nuclear deal negotiated — but never submitted to the Senate for ratification — by the Obama administration.

Indeed so. As I said in a comment last week, when you write with your finger on the beach, you have to hold back the tide.

The truth is, as much as they hate Trump’s policies, the president’s enemies hate the man even more. Donald Trump offends the establishment on a personal, visceral level. His opponents are the same folks who idolized Adlai Stevenson and thought Ike was just a dolt who somehow won World War II. Who worshipped John F. Kennedy (but were repelled by LBJ), hated Nixon, thought Reagan was an amiable dunce and erected shrines to Obama. They are the Ivy Leaguers, the credentialists, the Georgetown establishment for whom there is only one right way to conduct a presidency, and that is the Harvard-Democratic-groupthink way.

What Trump understands, however, is what many great leaders have understood: that “chaos,” not consensus, is the way ideas are tried and tested. That if someone or something isn’t working, scrap it and try something else. Results are what count, not consistency: Trump’s ability to morph from saber-rattling lunatic to charming glad-hander infuriates them because they see it as phony.

To me, this isn’t so much chaos, as it is the president’s learning curve and getting the right people in the right slots to make his vision work. George Marshall all through the thirties kept lists of officers he thought could lead American armies in war. Of the men on that list – well only Fredenhall who lost at El Guettar didn’t work out. The rest, well, you know the names as well as I do, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Hodges, MacArthur, and many more, thanks to Marshall’s superb planning. Trump didn’t have that opportunity.

Nor was he especially familiar with international diplomacy, any more than you and I are, so there has been a steep learning curve for him, not helped by the hostility here and abroad, which he shares with Eisenhower and Reagan. Pretty good company, I’d say.

Over the course of my life, I picked up the concept of the OODA Loop. It was developed by an Air Force officer, Colonel John Boyd, and it defines the lifeblood of competition, not only in the furball of aerial combat, that was COL Boyd’s milieu but in American business. I wrote about it here, but here are some of the basics.

Observe: This means mostly that you’ve been paying attention to all sorts of things. You know what’s going on in the world and what your opponent might be up to.

Orientation: This is your background, specialized knowledge and genetic make up and all sorts of other things that your mind uses to filter information. For instance, if you tell me on the phone that the light in your kitchen doesn’t work and that there is a burning smell; I’d tell you to turn off your electricity , and if the smoke smell persists, call the fire department. And since that’s my business, I’ll be there as soon as I can. If my specialty was something else, I’d likely tell you something else. A lot of orientation is experience. To use the Air Force again, if memory serves during WW II they found that if you survived 5 missions you were far more likely that the gross statistics showed, to finish your tour.

Decide: Make a decision, define the mission or whatever you choose to call it. This is where a lot of problems happen. It seems that it rarely happens that we get to make a decision on our own anymore. We have so much support infrastructure and it cost so damned much, that we think we always need more information or to consult or whatever. In my Doolittle example above; that’s the message to Pearl or Washington or a council of war. Any of these slow you down. One of the problems our opponent’s have (either big businesses or in the military realm) is that they usually have to get permission to act; often at a ridiculously high level.

Action: Do it and do it fast and then do something else. Keep doing things so fast that the opposition can’t ever keep up.

If you read that article, and the ones referred in it, you’ll know that is why America is so formidable, in business and in war, it’s the reaction time, multiple things going on so close together that they all run into each other. In other words, from outside, when done well, it looks like chaos. It also looks like Donald Trump’s America.

What is the Washington way? Well, Jessica once wrote about The Council of Florence, which was attempting to heal the Great Schism between the East and the West. That post made me fall off my chair laughing because for us it was about something else, something contemporary. It also describes ‘the Washington Way’ very well. This is too long already, but I’ll give you a taste.

There was a crisis, that was why they were meeting. Unless action was taken, then something unpleasant, and possibly worse would happen. It had taken time to get to this point. Those present were, of course, only protecting the dignity of their offices, and no one should think that any asperity in their conversational ripostes was anything to do with personal pride or arrogance, these men were, they all agreed, humble men, servants of the servants of God – and as such it behoved them to guard fiercely the dignity of the office of which they were but stewards.

So, talks about talks had produced a meeting in which there would now be an opportunity for all those present to talk. As one might have expected from such educated and even intellectual men, the talk was of high quality; had there been an olympiad for such things, giving out the gold would have been a very difficult task; it would certainly have involved more talks to ensure that the criteria established were so finely tuned that they would be able to pick up the echo the nuance of the inference which would surely bring the prize. Still, there was not, so at least there was one less thing to discuss.

Do read it all, and see if it sounds familiar to you. How did that council work out? Well…

In this way, seven months passed most pleasantly in the Italian city of Ferrara. Unfortunately, money was running out to pay for all these hungry thinkers, and there was plague in the area. So they decamped to the even more pleasant city of Florence in January, and seven months later came to an agreement on a formula of union between Rome and Constantinople. But when the Easterners got home, they were reminded that no one voice, indeed not even so many learned theologians and bishops, spoke for the Orthodox, so after all that, there was no union. Still that was fine, as the Westerners deposed their Pope anyway.

Fourteen years later the Ottomans massacred thousands of inhabitants of Constantinople and sold thousands more into slavery. A century later Western Christendom began to splinter into many fragments.

Sign at a protest outside Trump Tower in New York City, February 8, 2018. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

Victor Davis Hanson in National Review brings the summary of the situation in the US now. It’s not a pleasant picture…

When legal bloodhounds and baying critics fail to take out Trump, what’s next? The Resistance wants Trump’s head — on the chopping block.

On the domestic and foreign fronts, the Trump administration has prompted economic growth and restored U.S. deterrence. Polls show increased consumer confidence, and in some, Trump himself has gained ground. Yet good news is bad news to the Resistance and its strange continued efforts to stop an elected president in a way it failed to do in the 2016 election.

Indeed, the aim of the so-called Resistance to Donald J. Trump is ending Trump’s presidency by any means necessary before the 2020 election. Or, barring that, it seeks to so delegitimize him that he becomes presidentially impotent. It has been only 16 months since Trump took office and, in the spirit of revolutionary fervor, almost everything has been tried to derail him. Now we are entering uncharted territory — at a time when otherwise the country is improving and the legal exposure of Trump’s opponents increases daily.

First came the failed lawsuits after the election alleging voting-machine tampering. Then there was the doomed celebrity effort to convince some state electors not to follow their constitutional duty and to deny Trump the presidency — a gambit that, had it worked, would have wrecked the Constitution. Then came the pathetic congressional boycott of the inauguration and the shrill nationwide protests against the president.

Anti- and Never-Trump op-ed writers have long ago run out of superlatives. Trump is the worst, most, biggest — fill in the blank — in the history of the presidency, in the history of the world, worse even than Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler.

Next was the sad effort to introduce articles of impeachment. After that came weird attempts to cite Trump for violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. That puerile con was followed by plans to declare him deranged and mentally unfit so that he could be removed under the 25th Amendment. From time to time, Obama holdovers in the DOJ, National Security Council, and FBI sought to leak information, or they refused to carry out presidential orders.

As the Resistance goes from one ploy to the next, it ignores its string of failed prior efforts, forgetting everything and learning nothing. State nullification is no longer neo-Confederate but an any-means-necessary progressive tool. Suing the government weekly is proof of revolutionary fides, not a waste of California’s taxpayer dollars.

Mind, there’s not a word he writes that I disagree with, except that he might be overly optimistic.

[…]The Resistance and rabid anti-Trumpers have lost confidence in the constitutional framework of elections, and they’ve flouted the tradition by which the opposition allows the in-power party to present its case to the court of public opinion.

Instead, like the French revolutionaries’ Committee on Public Safety, the unhinged anti-Trumpists assume that they have lost public opinion, given their venom and crudity, and are growing desperate as every legal and paralegal means of removing Trump is nearing exhaustion. Robert Mueller is the last chance, a sort of Watergate or Abu Ghraib that could gin up enough furor to drive down Trump’s poll favorability to the twenties and thereby reduce his person to a demonic force deserving of whatever it gets.

That’s an acute observation, what we are seeing is the last act of the revolution, the lack of which differentiates the American Revolution from all others – the descent into tyranny. It was the original French revolution that first talked about equality of outcomes, while the British quiet revolution and American Revolution stressed equality under the law. It’s a huge difference, one between freedom and slavery.

VDH ends with this:

The danger to the country this time around is that the Left has so destroyed the old protocols of the opposition party that it will be hard to resurrect them when progressives return to power.

We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.

He may well be right. But in a way that begs the question. Is it proper for America to tolerate this fifth column in our midst? They have proved themselves at most disloyal to the ethos of the American Revolution and our founding documents.

Well, Shakespeare tells us that the brave only die once, and I’d add that once is enough if you do it right. Still, he’ll be missed greatly where men gather to speak of bravery and doing the right thing, and of US Marines, (and yes, once again I repeat myself).

A singular man, the only one promoted by the Corps after he retired so that his actual rank matched his nickname. Like so many others, my introduction was Full Metal Jacket, where his character provided us with an unforgettable glimpse of how men are built.

So we hear lots about Russian Collusion these days, near as I can tell, it’s all fake news, concocted to damage an American president. But it wasn’t always a fantasy, there are some cases. The American Spectator looked at perhaps the most flagrant yesterday. There is also an earlier article, here. Paul Kendor, who actually wrote the book, fills us in.

“Senator Kennedy’s request”

First, in brief recap, here’s what Parry noted: In books published in 2006 and 2010, I reported a highly classified May 14, 1983 memo from the head of the KGB, Victor Chebrikov, to his boss, the head of the USSR, Yuri Andropov. The lead words atop the document stated in caps: “SPECIAL IMPORTANCE.” The next words: “Committee on State Security of the USSR.” That’s the KGB. Under that followed this stunning header: “Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y. V. Andropov.” Kennedy’s request was delivered directly to Moscow by his law school roommate, John Tunney, a former Democratic senator from California.

In the memo, Kennedy was described by Chebrikov as “very troubled” by U.S.-Soviet relations, which Kennedy attributed not to the odious dictator spearheading the USSR but to President Ronald Reagan. The problem was Reagan’s “belligerence,” compounded by his alleged stubbornness. “According to Kennedy,” reported Chebrikov, “the current threat is due to the President’s refusal to engage any modification to his politics.” This was made worse, said the memo, because the 1984 presidential campaign was just around the corner, and Reagan was looking easily re-electable.

Well yeah, he was pretty electable in 1984. Wonder why?

The KGB memo speculated — compliments of Kennedy’s appraisal — that the chink in Reagan’s political armor was matters of war and peace. Thus, said the head of the KGB: “Kennedy believes that, given the state of current affairs, and in the interest of peace, it would be prudent and timely to undertake the following steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan.”

That is very significant. Here was a letter from the head of the KGB to the head of the USSR initiated by an offer from Ted Kennedy, amid the context of the coming presidential race, to “counter” Ronald Reagan.

Sounds very much like Russian collusion to me, at a time when Russia The Soviet Union was indeed America’s enemy. But wait, there’s more!

In the memo, Chebrikov then delineated for Andropov a series of specific steps proposed by Kennedy to help the Soviets “influence Americans.” This included Kennedy arranging for Kremlin officials to meet with certain American media. Which media? The memo went so far as to directly name Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters. Kennedy offered to help bring Soviet political and military officials to New York and Washington to connect them with friends in the press. And further, the memo included an offer from Kennedy himself to personally fly to the Kremlin to meet with Andropov.

Yes, a direct one-on-one between Kennedy and Andropov.

All of this was pursued in the deliberate service of countering this “belligerent” Reagan. Besides, noted Chebrikov, “Kennedy is very impressed with the activities of Y. V. Andropov and other Soviet leaders.”

Ted Kennedy: impressed with Andropov; unimpressed with Reagan.

The memo then wrapped up with an assessment of Kennedy’s own presidential prospects in 1984 (which even Chebrikov noted weren’t good). The memo instructed Andropov that Kennedy “underscored that he eagerly awaits a reply to his appeal.”

The next step. Well, we don’t know, the press never published any of this.

But even then, there’s much more to what I’ve reported on Kennedy and the Soviets. It’s this material that even conservatives have missed and largely glossed over from Dupes. Again, I urge readers to continue on.

One of these is an almost comical case of Russian manipulation smack on Moscow territory. On page 406 of Dupes is a photo of Ted Kennedy merrily dancing with a Russian bride at a reportedly staged Soviet wedding.

The source for the photo was Yuri Bezmenov, journalist and editor for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. A KGB hand himself, Bezmenov defected to the West in the 1970s. Among his chief duties in Moscow had been to handle Western visitors through propaganda and disinformation. This entailed some unique skills that applied to the likes of Kennedy. “One of my functions,” explained Bezmenov, “was to keep foreign guests permanently intoxicated from the moment they landed at Moscow airport.” He managed “groups of so-called ‘progressive intellectuals’ — writers, journalists, publishers, teachers, professors of colleges…. For us, they were just a bunch of political prostitutes to be taken advantage of.”

Bezmenov, sickened by the stench of the Soviet system, was deeply troubled that these progressives, who prided themselves on intellectual superiority, couldn’t detect the rot. (I’ve heard this lament many times from communist dissidents.) It nagged at his conscience. “I did my job,” he lamented, but “deep inside I still hoped that at least some of these useful idiots [would catch on].”

Among the worst of them, said Bezmenov, was Senator Ted Kennedy. With that, Bezmenov offered as an exhibit the photo of Kennedy dancing at a wedding at Moscow’s Palace of Marriages, but it wasn’t a real wedding. Gesturing to the photo, Bezmenov commented: “Another greatest example of monumental idiocy [among] American politicians: Edward Kennedy was in Moscow, and he… was being taken for a ride.” This was a “staged wedding used to impress foreign media — or useful idiots like Ed Kennedy. Most of the guests there [had] security clearance and were instructed what to say to foreigners.”

Monumentally stupid, or completely blinded by ideology? Take your pick, or go for the power of ‘and’.

I know this seems absurd to modern eyes and ears, but such were the wretched lengths to which the Soviets descended. They were outstanding liars. They built phony factories, schools, and villages to hoodwink Western visitors, beginning back in the 1920s, when they went full force in cynically suckering what I call “Potemkin Progressives”: John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, etc.

Notice those names? All heroes of the Anglo-American left. See a pattern?

And thus, one of the slicker gimmicks was a staged wedding, with lots of dancing, frolicking, girls, and booze. This was so well-known than even the New York Times, on March 10, 1958, published an article on these fake weddings, titled “Comrades Have Lovely Soviet Wedding; But Irked Party Finds It Was a Fraud.”

So, this was old hat to the Kremlin.

Bezmenov said that Kennedy “thinks he’s very smart,” but, “from the viewpoint of Russian citizens who observed this idiocy,” he was “an idiot,” a “useful idiot.”

So here we have the greatest hero of the left, a murderer, as Chappaquiddick shows, or at least prima facie guilty of negligent homicide, not to mention very very close to guilty of treason against the United States as well. We were saved by the innate sense of the American people, nothing else. I’d say just like 2016, but that’s not proven yet.

And of all the blindness of ambition, seeing Jimmy Carter as a warmonger! Hardly credible, even for this fool.

Last month I referred to an article that Kurt Schlichter wrote in Townhall. As usual, when you’re over the target, the Colonel has been taking some flack. He clarified a few things a few days ago, especially in relation to the preposterous article that Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter endorsed. His new Townhall article is here.

It will just sort of happen. Why? Because. Americans will simply decide to be like California because of reasons and phew, no more troublesome conservatives and Gaia is saved!

So basically, wishing.

Well, that’s a kind of war plan. Perhaps by unleashing the power of hoping so they can utterly subjugate the half of America that voted against Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and drive the people who actually operate and defend this country into silent obedience.

Or not.

Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Why do a bunch of San Francisco dorks think that 150 million Americans with 300 million guns are just going to give up their rights and their say in their own governance and submit to the commands of people who eat kale by choice?” That’s a fair question, and they have an answer.

That’s the article I referred, of course. And yes, I have read the article in Medium as well. It’s the most fantastical bit of wishful thinking I ever read. If that’s the level of this guy’s thinking he couldn’t properly manage a broom, And Jack is no better.

They want to silence you too, and every other patriot. But that’s a short-sighted tactic because people who are silenced, particularly uppity Americans who take their natural rights seriously, won’t just shrug and give up. They will stew and fume at the injustice of their oppression and then they will radicalize and then, because they have been wrongfully denied access to the means of participation in the governance of their own society, they will inevitably exercise their power in the only way left to them. They will rebel. They have before. Sometimes it’s peaceful – like by electing Donald Trump. But if peaceful doesn’t work, they are going to give not being peaceful a try. That’s just human nature.

This is where the liars pounce again with their fussy fauxtrage – leftists love violence directed at Normal Americans – but facts are facts. If the liberal plan to drive non-liberal Americans from the public square – the NRA, Laura Ingraham, and even Kevin Williamson silencing campaigns are just some recent examples – succeeds, it will only succeed for a little while. The fact is that if Normal people are barred from “legitimate” participation, they will participate “illegitimately.” Just ask the redcoats how taxation without representation worked out.

Here’s a hint: We Americans have good teeth and don’t eat spotted dick.

Bolt down that pressure cooker lid and turn up the fire, well ever see a steam explosion? This will be worse.

[…] But there are problems with using California as a role model, starting with the fact that California sucks.

Oh, it doesn’t suck for rich guys living by the beach like Jack and his hipster buddies. California is pretty great for bros like him. But the guys who cut his lawn and wash his Tesla and feed his pet pandas, well, not so much. The article claims, “California Democrats actually cared about average citizens.” Yeah, uh huh. Drive 10 miles inland from the beach and California dreamin’ becomes California nightmarin’.

California is a bankrupt failed state that is essentially Illinois with palm trees and better weather. Outside the coastal urban enclaves where Jack and his pals mingle, drinking kombucha and apologizing for their white privilege to their baffled servants, it’s a crowded, decaying disaster. Bums wander the streets, littering the sidewalks with human waste. Crime is rising. Illegal aliens abound, more welcome in the Golden State than actual Americans. California is an example all right, but a cautionary one.

In fact, the middle class in California is escaping just as fast as they can. It won’t be long until it’s Jack and his buddies, and illegal aliens, with damned few in the middle. The key point for the rest of us is to make sure they know why California went so bad, and don’t vote for it where they wash up. It’s already a problem in Montana, Colorado, and Texas. Texas seems to have a fair handle on it, the others not so much.

I imagine you remember the mess that spilled out from under the carpet in Rotheringham a while back. Hundreds of underage girls (what the media won’t tell you is, they are white working class girls, mostly) beaten, drugged, sexually abused, and such. “Grooming” they call it. Grooming for what, well I guess you can figure that one out. Very few if any people have yet to go to jail for it. Why? Because the perpetrators are, almost without exception, what the British euphemistically call, Asian. What they really are is Moslem, usually Pakistani, and their religion puts them above UK law, because of the higher law of PC. Sad, ain’t it?

There have been several cases since Rotherham spewed forth, and now there is still another, in Telford. Best I’ve read on it so far is from the Catholic Herald.

A casual attitude towards underage sex is putting children in terrible danger

What do Torbay, Liverpool, Rochdale, Thurrock, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Bristol and Somerset have in common? All have been the subject of serious case reviews published within the past five years in connection with child sexual exploitation. That’s without mentioning Professor Alexis Jay’s independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.

In all nine regions, a clear picture emerges of a culture in which underage sexual activity is viewed as relatively harmless so long as it is perceived to be consensual.

To that growing hall of shame, we must now add Telford. According to an 18-month Sunday Mirror investigation, an estimated 1,000 girls suffered sexual exploitation and abuse in the Shropshire district over a period of 40 years.

As yet, there has been no formal investigation into child sexual exploitation in Telford and no full published report, but from the limited information already available we see the reappearance of several features found in reports from other regions.

First of all, we find the same complacent attitudes towards underage sex. The Sunday Mirror reveals that “Council files show social services, teachers and mental health workers were fully aware of what was happening but did little. They also failed to tell police.”

Why? Because, like their counterparts in Rochdale, Rotherham and Bristol, education and welfare professionals in Telford assumed that the girls were making what are sometimes called “lifestyle choices”. “Instead of seeing them as exploited victims, some council staff viewed them as prostitutes,” we are told.

And so “case histories reveal many were ignored after reporting rapes to the police”. On the basis of prior assumptions that had been made about the girls, their reports were not taken seriously. The Rotherham Inquiry similarly found that “children as young as 11 were deemed to be having consensual sexual intercourse when in fact they were being raped and abused by adults”.

A second common feature is the ready and confidential provision of contraception and the morning-after pill to underage girls. One 14 year-old Telford victim said, “I must have been getting the morning-after pill from a local clinic at least twice a week but no one asked any questions.”

In spite of her frequent use of the morning-after pill, the girl fell pregnant twice and had two abortions. But presumably, still no questions were asked.

By virtue of the fact that they were seeking contraception and “sexual health services”, the girls were deemed to be making mature and responsible choices, and assumed to be freely exercising their sexual rights, even though many of them were under the age of 16 and in some cases were as young as 11.

Keep reading Norman Wells excellent article.

Whether this again involves Asians, I simply don’t know, but frankly, it matters little. That the British have become so callous towards these young girls, is the real scandal, I can imagine only a few places in America where such things could happen – on an industrial scale. A thousand girls! My God, if it were to happen most places in America – the accused would be very lucky indeed to make it to jail.

I have few answers, but I will note that this is what happens when you delegate authority that belongs to the family to an overweening welfare state. No doubt, still another chapter of this tragedy will be along shortly.

[And an update: My friends at The Conservative Womanare also writing about this, and know far more about the political situation than I do. Read the linked article, as well.]

A Reminder of Our Heritage

“Every man, who parrots the cry of ‘stand by the President’ without adding the proviso ‘so far as he serves the Republic’ takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the King could do no wrong. No self-respecting and intelligent free man could take such an attitude.”